


Two Big Hands And A Heart Pumping Blood

by Schgain



Series: Białowieża [3]
Category: Darkwood (Video Game)
Genre: Descriptions of Injury, First Aid, M/M, Minor Descriptions of Body Horror, One-Sided Attraction (maybe?), POV Second Person, Pining, Trader Centric, slight unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 09:03:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13678548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Schgain/pseuds/Schgain
Summary: The Trader is changing. Everything around him seems to stay the same.His comrade, especially, always seems to be a constant in his life.





	Two Big Hands And A Heart Pumping Blood

**Author's Note:**

> This has a smattering of vague-ish headcanons about, and less theories other than "Trader is an Outsider too" which canon seems to be a bit wishywashy on itself, so. 
> 
> This has way too much dialogue for a bunch of characters who don't say jack for shit.
> 
> Talk to me about the Pond Creature.
> 
> Title comes from [Going to Georgia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVEDIMHeCOE) by The Mountain Goats. 
> 
> As always, kudos and comments are greatly appreciated!

When dawn comes, you come with it.

(You are a creature of habit.) 

(No— You are becoming more and more of a creature, and habit follows.)

The man's house— the new man, the stranger, the outlier, the outsider, so many un-names for him and none feel right to write— is your first stop nowadays. Twice now has he stumbled from his home onto his own porch, burnt hands gripping your shoulders and sighing in relief for the salves and ammunition you bring. 

But when you arrive, boots stomping over drought-dry grass, the door to his home is hanging ajar, and it is the Wolf who leans on the facade of it. Peeled paint flecks litter his jacket and he's eating something that crunches between his teeth. When he sees you, he waves you over.

"If it isn't the brick shithouse!" He says. With six words you remember why you dislike him. You reach over your shoulder and pull out your notebook with a practiced grace. This is your most prized possession: blank paper is rare now, and this notebook has a picture of Reksio on the cover. 

(You'd nearly betrayed your heart when your Stranger had hastily pulled it out from the inside of his jacket, looking away and thrusting it into your chest. You had clapped, then pulled him into a hug. He of course said nothing, but he'd let out a long wheeze.)

"Where is he." You write. You quickly make the period a question mark; Reksio does not need to be subject to such aggression. 

The Wolf looks at you like he's illiterate. You know he isn't. 

"Who?" He asks. 

You snort in irritation so hard that you fog up your visor entirely. “You _know_ who." You write, and add a few brisk strokes, underlining for emphasis.

His grin grows wider, more shit-eating. “The dead man you mean?” 

Yes, your heart sings. “No,” you write, “He has a name.” 

“ _Really._ ” purrs the Wolf. “Care to share?” 

Some days… you really need to watch what you say.

You take a moment to let your frustration clear, turn the page so that your initial message shows, and you shove it in the Wolf’s face. He laughs, slightly hysterically, and raises a paw to push your notebook down. How dare he soil Reksio in such a way. 

“You’re a goddamned crazy son of a bitch,” says the Wolf, releasing his hold on your journal to pick at his teeth. “But don’t get to being a crazy son of a bitch at _me._ You want to know where that carcass is rotting now? Hell, I can’t even really tell you. He never came home last night. I saw him by the lake before the sun set, but he could be anywhere now.” He gives you a look, hungry and vicious and his own specific breed of cruelty. “Hell, he could be dead now. Deader, at least.” 

Your noise of anger makes him laugh and you stomp off. 

You don’t know what the Wolf means by lake, at first. There’s only one lake you know of, and you’re sure that your Stranger can’t go there. You’ve made absolute certain of that. 

Useless the mangy mutt was, you’re still an Outsider, though you’re certain some would disagree. The treads on your uniform’s boots are identical to your Stranger’s; you can follow his path through the wood with relative ease. 

His footprints tell a story, though not a nice one. (You think to yourself, wryly, that there are no nice stories in the wood where trees grow faster than fire burns, and horns pierce through the skin of your your forehead, and your brown locks grow wild in front of your face, and you snort more than you talk.) He walks at a leisurely pace, then stumbles through a thicket. His story is punctuated by broken tree branches and snapped twigs. He stops, paces in a circle (backwards?), then starts up again, faster. His stride is wider apart— he’d been running. A feather, strewn from something you hear often but try your best to not see, lays trampled in his wake.

That can’t be good.

You find him shortly thereafter, tossed upon the sodden banks of a pond that you haven't come across before. It’s large for a pond, with dark water that is choked with verdant duckweed. It gently ripples. Spring-fed, then? A stream might be on its opposite bank then, and fresh water, _real_ fresh water, could be a godsend. 

You step on something sticky. 

You look down and your Stranger is there, amongst the cattails, sitting in a pool of something black and viscous. You immediately pull your boot out of it, and ribbons of the liquid stretch under your sole. 

Your Stranger, below you, gives a shuddering breath. The amount of relief that floods you has no number or name. When you reach for him you are for once thankful of the strength that can beat down doors, and you lift him up (albeit awkwardly) and set him in clean grass. In your arms he is limp and heavy, like a dead thing. In your arms he is fragile and jostled, like a doll. 

He isn’t awake yet. You set to bandaging his wounds as best as you can. His entire top half of his body has been shredded, and it looks as though he twisted or even broken his ankle. A set of talons had raked across his face, splitting the seam of his visage evenly in two. But despite all this, even in half-sleep, he is obstinate and uncompromising, and flails his limbs at you in sluggish, aborted gestures. Twice in a moon-dim day you thank the fact that you are stronger than him, and manage to stem the bleeding on his torso without exacerbating the gash there. His scarf is soaked in his own blood, in the black ooze, in pond water. You unwind it from his face. He’ll need stitches. 

You wish your captain was here. She was always quickest with the suture and the staple. She was always quickest with the bayonet, too…

You hope she’s safe. You’ll find her and the rest soon. 

Disinfectant. Salve. Stitch. He groans in pain beneath you and you let out a shush that sounds like steam slowly escaping a valve. Bandage.

You’re set to move him, you think, when something in the pond moves. You turn with such a flash that your lower back smarts for it, and your Stranger makes a noise of displeasure from where he’s cradled in your arms. 

A gap of dark water marks where something had surfaced through the duckweed. You stare at the spot, unmoving. 

If whatever’s in the pond hurt your comrade, your brother, you’re going to gut it and sell it to the damned Wolf. You put your Stranger back down. 

With practiced, military silence, you take a fist sized rock from the pond’s edge, and fling it at the negative space in the swamp. 

Something shoots up and grabs it before it can make a splash: a hand, cold and wan. It sinks into the water, and a head follows, all but the mouth sticking up out of the water. It’s got a mess of hair so sodden you can’t tell the color, and a pair of eyes so cateyed-yellow they glow in the dim mid-morning light. It waves at you a little, and you’re glad it can’t see you glare. Instead, you gesture impatiently to your best customer, laying on the ground in a heap. 

“The pond was electrified,” says the Pond Creature with a gloomy, waterlogged voice. “Wires from a generator fell in. The man took my wrench,” they gesture to a scene you’d missed, choked by reeds near the far side of the pond. “and struck the generator with it. He made a great and terrible clamor, and that’s when the banshees came.” 

Dumber than a fucking box of rocks…

Your frown deepens. You don’t correct the Pond Creature that the generator had belonged to the Outsiders and more than likely so had the wrench. Instead, you pull out your notebook, and write on it:

“What happened then?”

The Creature swims up to get a closer look at what you wrote.

“I hid for most of it,” they admit. 

“Why didn’t anyone help him?” You hastily scribble. The pond monster stares at you blankly with its two reflective eyes.

“Why didn’t _you_ help him?” you amend. It lifts one hand, the hand it hadn’t used to catch the stone, meekly out of the water. A thick metal band is clasped around its wrist and a chain leads beneath the opaque water’s surface. 

You suppose that’s an excuse as any.

You shut your notebook with a muffled clap and set to work dragging your comrade back to greener pastures.You tuck him over your shoulder, and he makes a muted, half-conscious attempt at protesting this gesture for the sake of what you think is what’s left of his bruised and battered dignity. He also complains when you take his gun, but with the notion that banshees are in the area and you’ve got a dead man babbling non-words on your shoulder, you’re not taking chances with letting him firing it.

Luck must be a confirmed bachelor today, because when you get back to his home, you don’t see the Wolf anywhere. Your sigh of relief fogs up the glass of your visor. 

You get to setting about his house in a manner approaching liveable. You tuck your Stranger into his bed, then pick up what he dropped, scattered, or shot from two nights ago. It takes shorter than you’d like.

He calls to you by knocking on the bedpost and you wonder if you’re turning into a dog, not a bison, with the way that you’re at his beckon. 

He, in his nonverbal way, begs for mushrooms. You, in your nonverbal way, scold him for it. He sulks. You bring him water, you bring him bread. He eats while pouting and you write that you’ll put it on his tab.

His laugh sounds like a death rattle, now. 

Later, you drag a chair over and sit next to him while he rests. You allow yourself to nurse a headache, and run a hand underneath your hood to massage your hornbed. 

He tugs your hand. You look at him. He points at your notebook. You look at that instead. When he makes a grabbing gesture, you hand it and your pen over. 

His question is succinct, and yet… Unfathomably complicated. It’s six words, in his unmistakable handwriting only slightly marred by the shake in his grip: 

“Will you tell me about myself?” 

He hands you the pen, but he holds your notebook. You have to lean to get a good angle on writing, and your shoulder brushes his. 

“Your name is Specialist Łazarz,” you write, “You have a dog and you don’t shut up about him. He’s a setter mix and his name is Szurek. Your girlfriend complained to you that she thinks you might not be very creative.” 

He looks at you like you’re making fun of him. You stare back.

He takes the pen, mutely. He writes.

“I didn’t know I had a girlfriend.”

Damn him, damn him back to hell. Your heart breaks for him every moment, and this… 

He stares at you again. It takes you a moment to realize he’s looking at his reflection in your visor. His better-off hand reaches up and traces the bandage that goes across the diagonal of his face now, running from his mouth, across his cheek, and up to his temple. You remind yourself he can barely see you beyond the glass. He cannot see a bull of a man. 

He writes, barely looking at his hand as he does so.

“What about the rest of the company?” His question mark curls like a fish hook. There’s something to be said about getting gutted.

You think for a moment. You don’t owe him anything. You never took your orders from him. You could fashion him up a lie to chase after, or have him feel good about. When he passes you the pen his fingertips are warm against the gaps in your mitten. His eyes turn towards the paper and you snort out a sigh as you begin to write. 

“Nobody really liked you.” 

You watch his jaw set. It pulls at a suture and you’re sure it must hurt but of course he doesn’t say anything. You wonder why you wrote that. You wonder if you could take it back. 

It’s the truth, is the thing.

He stares at the words and at some point his eyes stop minutely moving, and you know he’s not even reading it anymore. He doesn’t ask for your pen back. You take your notebook from your lap and you think about Reksio cartoons, of a dog and his woodland friends.

His hand is warm on your wrist and you turn to look at him. This time he stares past the reflection, past the glass, searching for a face to a name that he doesn’t have. You don’t have either of them to give. Your ears twitch. His other hand, twisted between wraps of bandage, reaches up and tries to wipe filth off the glass with his thumb. He mouths something, some non-word you don’t catch. A streak in your vision gets clearer with his movement, slightly less grimy than the rest. 

You don’t know if he sees dark eyes with horizontal pupils, or a mess of ruddy red curls, or the start of horns pressing through your locks, velveteen and with bloody bases. You don’t know what he sees, and you suppose you never will. 

He lets you leave. You cross his front yard and you wonder if time in his hideout had ever passed at all. You make your rounds with no incident. The Chicken Lady says she’ll launder his scarf for you. You ask her about the creature in the pond and she just tells you that catfish doesn’t taste very good, and they live for very long times, so they get very big. 

When she hands you his scarf later, it’s soft and clean and dry, and looks brighter red than usual. You give her a thumbs up as payment and, as you wind it around your neck, you decide you’ll keep it until you see your Stranger next.


End file.
